With any quality assurance engineer or information technology administrator, it is a common scenario to qualify products and test applications. These tests are typically performed in an isolated manner so that the external network is not impacted by the tests being performed. With reference to virtualized products, the same holds true. Testing in internal networks helps in isolating the external local area network from any instabilities that could arise as a result of these tests. It should be appreciated that in some instances, malformed packets or other test applications need to be contained so as not to harm the external network.
Configuring one or two internal networks manually, with a firewall/router virtual appliance providing connectivity to the internal local area network from the external local area network it is not a labor intensive activity. It should be noted that the connectivity is important if the test engineer has to launch tests from a host in the external local area network. However, this manual configuration becomes daunting and even impossible to maintain and track if the number of servers multiply and the virtual machines are distributed across all these servers. One other shortcoming of the manual tracking method is that the test engineer can lose track of the network configuration if the virtual machines and/or networks have to be provisioned and destroyed dynamically.
It is within the context of these problems that the invention arises.